Roger
Waters: Pink Floyd star on why his fellow musicians are terrified to speak
out against Israel

Exclusive: 'If they say something they will no longer
have a career – I have been accused of being a Nazi and an
anti-Semite'

Paul Gallagher

Saturday 20 February 2016 16:18
BST

American musicians who support boycotting Israel over the issue of
Palestinian rights are terrified to speak out for fear their careers
will be destroyed, according to Roger Waters.

The Pink Floyd star – a
prominent supporter of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign
against Israel since its inception 10 years ago – said the experience of
seeing himself constantly labelled a Nazi and anti-Semite had scared people
into silence.

"The only response to BDS is that it is anti-Semitic,"
Waters told The Independent, in his first major UK interview about his
commitment to Israeli activism. "I know this because I have been accused of
being a Nazi and an anti-Semite for the past 10 years.

"My industry
has been particularly recalcitrant in even raising a voice [against Israel].
There’s me and Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Manic Street Preachers, one or two
others, but there’s nobody in the United States where I live. I’ve talked to
a lot of them, and they are scared s***less.

"If they say something in
public they will no longer have a career. They will be destroyed. I’m hoping
to encourage some of them to stop being frightened and to stand up and be
counted, because we need them. We need them desperately in this conversation
in the same way we needed musicians to join protesters over
Vietnam."

Waters likened Israeli treatment of Palestinians to apartheid
South Africa. "The way apartheid South Africa treated its black population,
pretending they had some kind of autonomy, was a lie," he said.

"Just
as it is a lie now that there is any possibility under the current status
quo of Palestinians achieving self-determination and achieving, at least, a
rule of law where they can live and raise their children and start their own
industries. This is an ancient, brilliant, artistic and very humane
civilisation that is being destroyed in front of our eyes."

A trip to
Israel in 2006, where Waters had planned to play a gig in Tel Aviv and the
end of the European leg of his Dark Side of the Moon Live tour, transformed
his view of the Middle East.

After speaking to Palestinian artists as
well as Israeli anti-government protesters, who called on him to use the gig
as a platform to speak out against Israeli foreign policy, he switched the
concert from Hayarkon Park to Neve Shalom, an Arab/Israeli peace village.
But as the tickets had already been sold, the audience was still entirely
Jewish Israeli.

Waters said: "It was very strange performing to a
completely segregated audience because there were no Palestinians there.
There were just 60,000 Jewish Israelis, who could not have been more
welcoming, nice and loyal to Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, it left an
uncomfortable feeling."

He travelled around the West Bank towns of Jenin,
Ramallah and Nablus, seeing how the two communities were segregated – and
also visited the security barrier separating Israel from the Occupied
Territories spraying a signed message from his seminal work "Another Brick
in the Wall", which read: "We don’t need no thought control".

Waters
soon joined the BDS movement, inviting opprobrium and condemnation for
daring to do what so few musicians are prepared to. "I’m glad I did it," he
says, as people in Israeli are "treated very unequally depending on their
ethnicity. So Palestinian Israeli citizens and the Bedouin are treated
completely different from Jewish citizens. There are 40 to 50 different laws
depending on whether you are or you are not Jewish."

Waters expected
to be shouted down by critics, but it is the Nazi accusations that he
considers the most absurd, especially given that his father, Lt Eric Waters
of the 8th Royal Fusilliers, died aged 31 fighting the Nazis at Anzio,
Italy, in early 1944. His body was never found but his name is commemorated
at the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Monte Cassino.

Welcome to the new,
glamorous face of fascism. Jane Wheatley meets Marion Le Pen and her aunt
Marine, part of a far-right dynasty intent on reshaping French
politics.

I am due to meet France’s youngest MP in her office at the
country’s National Assembly but am prevented by a cordon of police and
barricades holding back thousands of protestors. The Assembly is voting this
afternoon on a bill legalising same sex-marriage and demonstrators on
both sides of the debate are out in force. I call her press assistant,
who comes out to get me. "The French love their demonstrations," he
says, as a policeman waves us through the barriers.

Marion
Maréchal-Le Pen, of the far right Front National (FN) party, sits at her
desk by an open window with a view through the leaves of a plane tree onto a
small square below. There is a faint smell of cigarettes in the room and I
think that, like so many young women in France, Marion is probably a
smoker.

Marine is, in fact, far more dangerous than her father ever
was.

Dressed in black pants and fitted jacket over a crisp, white shirt
with a small gold chain at her throat, Marion talks fast and fluently,
though perhaps a little too much and too eagerly – like a student who has
done her homework and wants you to know it.

Here she is on
globalisation: "A form of protectionism should be enforced at national
level, at least on strategic areas such as agriculture."

And on
membership of the European Union: "Choosing Europe is suicidal, even more so
with intra- as well as extra-Europe competition."

On social policy:
"French people should be prioritised; clandestine immigrants get 100 per
cent refund on healthcare while two-thirds of French people can’t afford
medical help. Charity begins at home."

How did she vote in today’s debate
on same-sex marriage? The FN is radically opposed, she says: "It is not
homophobia; it is because [same-sex marriage] opens the door to adoption.
Love is important but not always enough. I think it is egotistical for
people to knowingly deprive a child of having both a mother and a father
just because they want a child."

What about single-parent families?
"Generally it’s a way for homosexuals to adopt."

Would she like to
have children herself? "Well," she smiles, "I need to find my soul mate
first. The life of a female politician makes it hard to combine personal
life and work, but I think it is almost a patriotic duty to have
children."

Marion belongs to a political dynasty. Her grandfather is
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 84-year-old father of France’s extreme right: founder
of the Front National, bruiser, patriot and, in the eyes of the country’s
bien pensant middle classes, devil incarnate. Marion’s aunt is Marine Le
Pen, who at 44, after doing the hard yards in municipal politics, was
elected – some might say anointed – president of the FN when her father
retired in 2010 and is an MEP in the European Parliament. In the first round
of the 2012 presidential elections, Marine won almost a fifth of the vote
behind Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. The same year, her niece
Marion became a deputy (MP) in the National Assembly, at 22 the youngest
in the history of the republic.

Thanks to Marine and Marion, the FN
has increased its support among women and young people – 30 per cent of 18-
to 24-year-olds voted for Marine in the presidential elections – and Marion
says she is proud to represent patriotic youth: "Being so young is an asset,
people see it as a kind of purity – it’s hard to imagine someone as young as
me being corrupted already!"

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen’s parliamentary
seat is Carpentras, in the Vaucluse region of the rural south. A bus takes
me from the former papal seat of Avignon, past the stout city walls and past
several posters of Marine Le Pen’s face bearing the legend, "Oui, la
France".

Carpentras was once a thriving market town surrounded by fertile
fields and orchards. "It was known as the bread basket of France," local
hotel manager Frédéric Van Orshoven tells me. "Then the trucks came from
Spain, straight up the new motorway to Paris, and Carpentras began to
collapse."

Thirty years ago the region imported labour from North
Africa – Tunisians and Moroccans, known as Magrebs – to work in the fields
and processing plants.

"We needed them," explains Van Orshoven. "But
now the next generation are unemployed, hanging about in gangs, dealing
drugs. Their women wear the veil [frowned on in aggressively secular France]
and we have two mosques, one of them fundamentalist."

Can the town’s
new deputy do anything useful? He shrugs: "What can she do – throw them
away? They are French after all." In the market the next morning I find two
elderly woman gossiping: what do they think of Marion?

"She is very
pretty, very agreeable, always smiling, but what she proposes is
impossible," says one, prodding me gently in the chest. "Return France to
the French? It is too late for that. There are Magreb women here of my age,
they have children and grandchildren."

In a playground in one of the
squares, two well-dressed women, mother and daughter, are watching a toddler
on the swings. "This Le Pen girl is parachuted in," says one. "You can see
why people voted for her." She nods meaningfully towards a young woman
wearing a niqab. A Senegalese woman in a colourful turban tells me:
"Patriotism is good, I love my own country, but sometimes it feels dangerous
to be from somewhere else."

I walk out of town to the brand new FN office
where Marion holds her weekly meetings with constituents. Builders are
hammering and drilling while she sits at an enormous table in an otherwise
empty room, listening to problems. One woman explains she is worried for her
children’s safety because of gangs of older boys roaming the streets and
torching cars, seemingly out of reach of the police and
courts.

Marion is sympathetic and attentive; she doesn’t have any ready
solutions but the woman relaxes, feeling listened to. It’s an impressive
and, I think, genuine performance from the 23-year-old.

As I leave
them still chatting and smiling, I study the posters in the foyer: several
of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marion’s grandfather, in his younger days, looking
generally virile and heroic – one of him holding Marion as an angelic, curly
headed baby – and more of her aunt Marine during her presidential
campaign.

While the junior member of the family has made a good debut and
Le Pen père trades on past glories, there is little doubt that Marine is the
big hitter just now.

These two women – blonde, statuesque Marine with
something of her father’s physicality, and Marion, slim and strikingly
pretty with long, fair hair – are the new faces of the far
right.

Both are intent on what Marine has termed the de-demonisation of
the party, carefully distancing themselves from some of Jean-Marie’s more
notorious rhetoric – xenophobic, anti-Semitic, homophobic – and from the
thuggish, skinhead elements in the party. One member, captured on film
giving a Nazi salute, was summarily dismissed by Marine.

Instead,
they have appeared to modernise without abandoning a right-wing discourse:
not pro-abortion but pro a woman’s right to choose; not anti-gay but against
gay marriage; not overtly racist but in favour of draconian curbs on
immigration. When Marion used her one chance, as a new deputy, to speak in
the full Assembly, she chose to protest at the influx to French cities of
poverty-stricken Romanians and Bulgarians – known colloquially as "les Roms"
– and was applauded by the House.

And the current dire economic downturn
has played to the party’s strengths: themes of anti-globalisation,
protectionism and immigration control resonating with communities struggling
with 10 per cent unemployment and the loss of traditional blue-collar
jobs.

Marion grew up in the family house with her siblings and cousins
and is close to Jean-Marie. "Though he always had a busy schedule, he is not
the classic grandfather sitting with the grandchildren on his lap," she
says.

Practically everyone in the Le Pen family, including spouses
and partners, are paid-up party members and yet Marion insists they came to
their political views independently. "We don’t talk about politics
around the dinner table; there was no brainwashing. My grandparents’
passion for France was conveyed, naturally, but the FN wasn’t the
obvious route for me at first."

In fact, Marion flirted with
Sarkozy’s centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party before
joining the FN. "I didn’t support him as such," she says, "But his character
seduced me and I thought, ‘Why not?’ He galvanised people and he was a
lawyer, not from high administration, so it was a change from other
politicians. My interest drifted, though, when I saw discordance between his
words and actions: he aligned too much with the United States; he
disappointed people on fiscal matters, competition, sovereignty and
especially on security. There was more immigration under Sarkozy than under
Jospin!" (Socialist Lionel Jospin was prime minister of France from 1997 to
2002.)

Yet for all her talk of independence, the widespread and sometimes
violent antipathy towards Jean-Marie’s political extremism created a
siege mentality within the family. Marion’s mother and aunts were
children when the family apartment was bombed by anti-FN activists, and
they had a hard time from pupils and staff at the state schools chosen
for them by Jean-Marie. "He told them, ‘You will have to face the knocks
as they will last your whole life,’ " explains Marion. She, too, was
sent to a state school but changed to the private system after
experiencing similar discrimination: "Because my name, Le Pen, is
heavily charged, it unleashed a lot of passion."

Yet she chose to
keep the name, along with her father’s, Maréchal. "Yes, because despite the
discrimination I’m very proud of the Le Pen name. It is part of my political
heritage."

Though Marine is now leader of the FN, Jean-Marie’s staff
still refer to him as "Monsieur le President". In the leafy confines of the
family home in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud at least, JM is still clearly
le grand fromage. During my afternoon with him, he confided that Marion was
at first reluctant to stand for election to the Assembly. "She said,
‘But grandpapa, I have my law exams.’ I told her, ‘How can we expect
young people to be involved in politics if we don’t set the example?’ So
she won her election and straight afterwards she passed her
exams!"

Today, Marine Le Pen is on the cover of the weekly news and
current affairs magazine L’Express, her head thrown back, laughing, and
underneath in large type, two words: "Elle monte!" Inside, five pages
analysing the rise and rise of "the devil’s daughter", and how she has
brought the FN in from the cold, from outside the pale into mainstream
French politics.

In the 2012 presidential election, Marine stole
centre-right voters from Nicolas Sarkozy, pushing him into second place
behind Francois Hollande. The Socialist Party leader went on to win the
presidency but has made a sad fist of it, losing popularity at a cracking
pace. A recent poll concluded that in a straight race between Hollande and
Le Pen, Marine would win. Another poll revealed that 65 per cent of French
people think Marine is "courageous".

How did the woman who is, as
several political commentators have warned, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, gain
so much credibility?

"Her feminine softness makes what was aggressive in
the father relatively admissible in the daughter," says Pascal Perrineau,
professor at Paris’s elite Institute for Political Studies. Commenting ahead
of the 2012 presidential race, Alain Duhamel of the left-wing Libération
newspaper went further: "She is, unfortunately, a very intelligent
woman: combative, highly polished … extremely sure of herself and her
intuitions and gifted with an incomparable aplomb. She is, in fact, far
more dangerous than her father ever was."

Last month, the European
Parliament voted to strip Marine Le Pen of diplomatic immunity, leaving the
way clear for French authorities to prosecute her for inciting racial hatred
by comparing Muslim prayers in the street to the Nazi occupation of
France.

At a 2010 rally in Lyon, she told party members, "For those who
like to talk about World War II, to talk about occupation, we could talk
about, for once, the occupation of our territory. There are no armoured
vehicles, no soldiers, but it is an occupation all the same and it
weighs on people."

After the overwhelming vote against her, an
unrepentant Le Pen attacked her fellow MEPs for violating her right to
freedom of expression.

Earlier this year, on a blustery spring day in
England, knots of protesters were assembling outside the Cambridge
University Union, unfurling banners in readiness for the arrival of Marine
Le Pen. "No to racism, fascism and Islamaphobia" read one, "No Nazis here.
Stop Le Pen" another.

The ancient university’s debating chamber
prides itself on inviting controversial speakers to address members. A
placard reading, "Union, you [heart sign] rapists and fascists", referred
both to Le Pen and to the recent visit of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former
head of the International Monetary Fund, accused of raping a chambermaid in
a New York hotel.

By the time Marine Le Pen’s black BMW swings into
the street at the rear of the Union building, the crowd has swelled to
several hundred and police lines are in position. She could have been
smuggled in via a secret underground passage but chooses instead to walk to
the entrance in full view of protestors, as her father had done 10 years
earlier.

A queue of ticket holders snakes around the building waiting to
be frisked by security. I ask a third-year law student why he has come.
"She got 20 per cent of the [presidential] vote," he says, "so she’s
obviously a force in French life and I think we should hear what she has
to say. Nazis didn’t come to power because people listened to them –
rather because people didn’t listen."

Every seat in the chamber is
taken, there are overflow rooms packed with people and as reporters squeeze
onto a bench in the upper gallery Le Pen makes her entrance, wearing
tailored pants and a black jacket over a low-cut blouse.

Using her
hands for emphasis, blonde bob swinging, she is straight into familiar
themes: the "re-armament" of France to reclaim sovereignty from a
domineering eurocracy, the need for market regulation, the "poison" of mass
immigration, the "insult" of women in burqas and Muslim prayers in the
streets of France, and the 21st-century "totalitarianisms" of globalisation
and Islam.

By the time she and I sit down together in a room upstairs,
she has talked for an hour, faced a battery of universally hostile questions
and her deep, powerful voice is croaking a little. Her minder tells me we
can have only 10 minutes. So, we must rattle through some
questions.

Why did she come?

Because, she says, the Front National
has been caricatured, mainly in the minds of the elite: "If I can show them
our true face, what we really stand for, then it is worthwhile coming here."
Her party is conflated with the extreme right National Front in Britain, she
says, when actually it is closer to the eurosceptic UK Independence Party
(UKIP).

She would like to reduce immigration to France to 10,000 a year
from its current level of 250,000. How?

She would put a stop to
family reunions and cut back on the right to asylum, "which has been heavily
abused". She sees no reason to welcome nationals from former French
colonies: "Having won their independence, why should they be allowed in the
country of their former colonial masters?"

Who would she let
in?

She would allow a small number of "really deserving people" seeking
asylum from persecution, otherwise only those whose skills and talents
could contribute something to France.

If she were in power, what
would she do for working women with families?

She would increase
child-care provision but also offer a "parent salary" to those who choose to
stay home to raise children. Why does she continue to reside in the Le Pen
family home?

"We all have heavy work schedules and this way we can keep
the family links going strong. And my mother is kept very busy caring for
her grandchildren; I couldn’t do all I do without her."

When I ask
about her niece, Marion, her face softens visibly: "She is really like my
own daughter," she says, "I am so proud of her."

Can these two Le Pen
women alone reshape the Front National to be the third force in French
politics? Not without more MPs – although the party achieved more than 13
per cent of the vote in the 2012 national legislative elections, there are
currently only two FN MPs in the Assembly. But the crisis with the euro and
the economic recession gripping Europe are grist to their mill. And the FN’s
anti-European Union stance finds echoes across the channel, where the UKIP
is making inroads among Conservative Party voters.

The FN’s emphasis
on protectionism, regulation of financial markets and what Pascal Perrineau
calls "welfare-state chauvinism" chime with the rhetoric of the French left
while also appealing to beleaguered conservative voters. Writing in
left-leaning US magazine The Nation ahead of the presidential election, the
French journalist Agnès Poirier noted: "[Marine] Le Pen has cunningly surfed
on the euro crisis and blurred traditional and ideological boundaries … She
[is] hunting on everybody’s grounds, stealing from all in the most
unpredictable way."

Will the UMP be forced to consider a coalition with
the FN? Not at a national level, says Gilles Ivaldi, head of research at
think tank, the National Centre for Scientific Research. "Leaders of the
mainstream right have unambiguously rejected alliance with the FN," he says.
"Coalitions between the right and extreme right are more likely to take
place at the local level, particularly in the southern regions, like
Vaucluse, where the local UMP has traditionally had closer links with
the FN."

And Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Ivaldi says, is already set to
lead the FN municipal campaign in the south next year. I recall that in
Carpentras, hotel manager Frédéric Van Orshoven had told me that he could
see Marion as a town mayor – a position that is important in provincial
France, much more than ceremonial. It seemed such an odd idea, this slender,
educated Parisienne, chief among the stolid burghers, but he was quite
serious.

I ask Ivaldi, could Marine Le Pen be president one day?
Unlikely in the near future, he says. "The FN is still stigmatised by a
majority of voters and the party remains isolated in French politics, where
there is little space available to third parties outside of an alliance with
one of the dominant actors of the left and the right."

In the elegant
upstairs room of his luxury home, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the family patriarch,
sits in a silk upholstered armchair considering the future for his golden
girls.

Le Pavillon de l’Ecuyer – the Squire’s Pavilion – is an imposing
red-brick manor screened by tall horse-chestnut trees, their creamy
candles just in flower, and set on a hill in the private, gated grounds
of Montretout Park in the affluent suburb of Saint-Cloud. From the wide,
balustraded stone terraces on ground and first floors, it seems the
whole of Paris is spread at our feet: in the distance the tower of
Montparnasse, the gold dome of Les Invalides, the roofs of Montmartre
and – if you peer round the pink froth of a splendid Japanese cherry –
the Eiffel Tower.

Through the open French windows with their
pigeon-grey wooden shutters, there are the sounds of birdsong and children’s
voices – several of Le Pen’s nine grandchildren are playing in the grounds
with friends.

Of his three daughters, two still live here with their
children: the middle one, Yann, occupies converted servants’ quarters on the
top floor and the youngest, Marine, has an apartment over the former stable
block. Their mother, Le Pen’s first wife Pierette, lives in a Hansel and
Gretel-style chalet in the grounds.

After their very public split in
1987, Pierette posed for Playboy magazine, naked save for an apron, wielding
a broom in protest at her husband’s suggestion that if she lacked money she
should work cleaning houses. There had presumably been a rapprochement at
some stage? "Why, yes," says Le Pen expansively. "I could not deprive les
petites of their grandmother."

He believes that Marion might be more
talented than her aunt: "She has started young," he says, "so will have many
years to gain experience, whereas Marine began in politics much
later."

He once called Marine "une petite bourgeoise" and now explains:
"It was in comparison with my upbringing. I was born in a house with no
floor. Marine is a woman of her time, she’s had a middle-class education,
she has three children, she’s been divorced twice, women recognise
themselves in her. And men are becoming more feminine, too."

I look
around the resolutely masculine room with its rows of leather-bound books,
model ships, shelves of tiny lead soldiers and statuettes of Joan of Arc,
long ago claimed by the FN as its nationalist figurehead. What on earth does
this burly former parachute officer, the son of a Breton fisherman, make of
a world in which men find their inner female and the movement he created is
now headed by a woman?

"I approve of the way Marine is leading the
party," says her father, "and the direction in which she is bringing it –
she’s very capable. Our ‘man’ today is actually a woman, Jeanne
d’Arc!"

Hundreds of students
gathered outside Cambridge University’s prestigious debating society on
Tuesday to protest a speech by French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whose
visit sparked an outcry among anti-fascist groups in the
country.

France’s far-right darling Marine Le Pen paid a visit to the
historic UK city of Cambridge on Tuesday when she was invited to speak at
the university’s famed debating society.

Some 200 students turned out
to protest the arrival of the National Front (FN) leader, waving banners
reading "No Nazis here. Stop Le Pen" and "No platform for
fascists".

The protesters were referring to comments made by Le Pen in
2010 when she compared Muslim prayers in the streets of France with the Nazi
occupation. "For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if
it's about occupation, then we could also talk about [Muslim prayers in
the streets]," she said. "There may not be any tanks or soldiers, but it
is nevertheless an occupation."

The protest was supported by the
university's Black and Minority Ethnic Campaign, the Cambridge Universities
Labour Club, the NUS Black Students’ Officer and the Socialist Worker
movement. Posted on yfrog by @Fio_edwards.

The demonstration against
her visit on Tuesday was organised by the Unite Against Fascism (UAF)
association, which described Le Pen and her national Front party as "deeply
racist".

"Fascist organisations across Europe are attempting to take
advantage of the economic crisis and the impact of austerity, to build
support," the group said in an online statement. "Like her father, Marine Le
Pen seeks to organize a capacity for extra-parliamentary activity through
rallies, street demonstrations and links to openly ‘revolutionary
nationalist’ groups," it said.

The protest was supported by the
university's Black and Minority Ethnic Campaign (BME SC), the Cambridge
Universities Labour Club, the NUS Black Students’ Officer and the Socialist
Worker movement. Members of the Cambridge University's Student Union were
also in attendance.

The FN dismissed the UAF and its allies as "radical
minority, communitarian groups" and argued that Le Pen was widely respected
in the UK. "These fringe groups are bound to make noise," FN Vice President
Florian Philippot told French TV channel i-Tele on Thursday. "But the
majority of British people are very happy to welcome Marine Le Pen. They
are pleased to see that there is still a free spirit in
France."

‘Don’t even know who she is’

France’s National Front
party has become a popular force in French politics since it was formed in
1972. Marine’s 2011 takeover from her aged her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is
thought to have softened the reputation of the party. The raspy-voiced
leader, who is considered almost charming in comparison with her
short-tempered father, gained an easy third place in last year’s president
election with 17.8% of the vote.

But the 44-year-old leader remains
relatively unknown in the UK, where far-right groups are gradually gaining
speed but have yet to match the electoral achievements of the FN in
France.

"Up till two days ago, I did not know who Marine Le Pen was,"
Cambridge law undergraduate Jinho Clement admitted in a blog on HuffPost
Students. Clement, who is also chair of Cambridge University Students’
Union, supported Le Pen’s invitation. "For the sake of people like me who
don't know much about people like Le Pen, it makes a lot of sense to invite
her to Cambridge," he said. "Free speech ensures that societies like the
union can provide a forum for discussions like these."

The Cambridge
Union Society, which prides itself on its "political independence", is known
for raising hackles both within the university and in society at large with
its choice of guests.

Le Pen joins a list of controversial figures in
addressing the prestigious university union. Dominique Strauss-Kahn paid a
visit in March 2012 and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made an appearance
via video link in November. The union has also hosted Holocaust denier David
Irving and, infamously, former fascist leader Oswald Mosley in the
1970s.

Ex-aide to Jean-Marie Le
Pen: ‘Zionists, Freemasons’ control French media

Former National Front
party adviser Elie Hatem once ran for mayor of Paris district for nearly
defunct monarchist movement

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF February 19, 2016,
2:59 am

Elie Hatem, a political adviser to former French National Front
party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, accused "Zionists and Freemasons" of
controlling "public opinion" and the media in France.

Le Pen was
removed from leading the party he founded in 2011, and the reins were taken
by his daughter Marine.

"We know that Marine Le Pen got closer to some
movements that control public opinion in France," Hatem, a Maronite
Christian of Lebanese descent, told Al Arabiya TV last week. A transcript of
the interview was translated from Arabic by MEMRI.

"She did so in
order to whitewash the National Front. These movement include Zionist
movements and Freemasonry which control the press and the government in
France," Hatem said.

The Al Arabiya interviewer interrupted Hatem, saying
it was up to the French authorities responsible for the media to answer the
allegations.

Hatem replied: "Even some Zionists say so, this is well
known in France, that is why everybody is afraid to talk about this. This is
a sort of dictatorship."

Hatem said he was a member of the French
national movement L’action Francaise, "a royalist movement founded by
Charles Maurras."

"I am against the idea of secularism espoused by Marine
Le Pen, as I told her on several occasions," Hatem said.

"The
Freemasons were behind the secularism and they founded the French republic
government on the three principles defended by Freemasonry: liberty,
equality and fraternity," he said.

In 2014, Hatem was the National
Front’s candidate for mayor of the 4th arrondissement of Paris. He was a
curiosity of sorts at the time, being the first Action Francaise member to
stand for election in any capacity in 20 years.

Action Francaise is a
far-right monarchist movement established in 1899 in reaction against the
support of left-wing intellectuals of Jewish French army officer Alfred
Dreyfus.

Maurras, mentioned by Hatem, became the movement’s ideologue and
steered it in a Catholicist, anti-secularist direction. Maurras called for
the reversal of the principles of the French Revolution.

Maurras was
imprisoned after World War II and the movement’s popularity waned. Its
ideas, however, remain influential in some circles of the French far
right.

When Hatem ran for election, his colleagues in the National Front
tried to play down his ties to Action Francaise, presenting the movement as
a stream with the National Front more than a political entity in its own
right.

PARIS — Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right
National Front, was crowned "political liar of 2015" by a panel of
journalists for making false claims about migrants.

Among the
comments that earned the FN leader the prize was a false claim about the
number of migrants headed towards Europe. In June, Le Pen said around 4,500
migrants were arriving in Europe "every day" in an interview with French
channel iTélé.

Le Pen was slammed for making claims that bore little
relation to official figures from Frontex, Europe’s border agency. Frontex
figures from April 2015 showed that migrants had actually been arriving in
Europe at a rate of around 330 per day since December 2015.

The
majority of Le Pen’s claims were made during French regional elections in
December, in which the FN rode a wave of anti-migrant sentiment in the
aftermath of the November 13 terror attacks.

The prize was set up in 2015
by political scientist Thomas Guénolé as a way of holding politicians
accountable. The first winner of the prize was former President Nicolas
Sarkozy, which, according to the rules, meant he couldn’t win this year’s
award.

Among those on the panel were journalists from French dailies Le
Monde and Libération.

France's far-right National Front party has asked Russia for a
27-million-euro ($30 million) loan, claiming that the party needs it to
finance its election campaigns in 2017, The Times newspaper reported
Friday, citing the party’s treasurer.

Le Pen's party received a loan
of 11 million euro from a bank with ties to Russia in 2014. At that time,
French politicians and media claimed that the loan bought the party's public
support of Russia's actions in Ukraine, the Meduza news agency
reported.

Le Pen's party claimed that the results of the Crimea
referendum in 2014, followed by the annexation of the peninsula by Russia,
were legitimate, and also criticized the implementation of European Union's
sanctions against Russia over its actions in Ukraine.

The CIA has
opened an investigation into Russian influence on European political
movements over the last 10 years, according to an announcement made in
January, Meduza reported.

About Me

'Mission statement'.
I am convinced that jewish individuals and groups have an enormous influence on the world. The MSM are, for almost all people, the only source of information, and these are largely controlled by jewish people.
So there is a huge under-reporting on jewish influence in the world.
I see it as my mission to try to close this gap. To quote Henry Ford: "Corral the 50 wealthiest jews and there will be no wars." `(Thomas Friedman wrote the same in Haaretz, about the war against Iraq! See yellow marked area, blog 573)
If that is true, my mission must be very beneficial to humanity.